AIR dropped for Indo-Pak tour

ARY has refused to sell the rights to AIR at the price offered, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jan 6, 2006, 10:14:00 IST

PTI | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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For some, nothing beats the live commentary of a big-ticket cricket match on radio. It's old-fashioned, but it has its charm. But when the India-Pakistan series starts — and it doesn't get any bigger than this — the fun and games may be restricted to television alone, as All India Radio has failed to bag the radio rights for the series.

AIR had bagged the radio rights for the 2003 friendship series between India and Pakistan from Ten Sports. Last year, Ten Sports sold the rights to another Dubai-based company, ARY broadcasters — a company with 11 channels that has rights for cricket matches in Pakistan and the Middle East.

Now, ARY has refused to sell the rights to AIR at the price offered. According to sources, AIR is willing to pay $40,000 for the entire series, the amount it paid Ten Sports in 2003.

ARY feels the price is too low and has demanded $2.5 lakh for the entire series. Their contention is that AIR earned $5 lakh from the last series and, therefore, the amount they're quoting is reasonable.

AIR, on the other hand, is refusing to go any higher, justifying its quotation by saying it will have to bear the entire production cost and that the hype this time isn't as high.

"Talks have broken as the Sports Marketing Committee of Prasar Bharati has refused to accept ARY's price," a top Prasar Bharati official told HT, but added that negotiations were still on.

AIR's failure to bag the rights will mean that about 50 per cent of its 24 crore listeners won't be able to tune their their radio sets as they did in 2003. "Our estimate is that over one crore people in cities, including 5 lakh in Delhi, listen to match commentary on our FM Gold channel," an official said.

No radio rights will also mean revenue loss for AIR as it gets maximum advertising rates for India-Pakistan matches.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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